Here’s an interesting article from this week’s El Paso Inc.
The story explains how El Pasoans will start drinking “purified” toilet water in 2017.
El Paso will be the first city in the nation to directly drink its own sewage. In a multi-stage process, the city will take our wastewater, which is currently treated and released into the Rio Grande for use as irrigation water, and then re-treat it three more times before putting it back into the pipes for El Pasoans to drink and bathe with.
Wichita Falls made national news last month when their water re-use plant came on line. But what Wichita Falls does is add the treated sewage to its reservoirs. El Paso Water Utilities plans to put its treated effluent directly into our homes, or at least our homes’ pipes. Whether or not you drink it is up to you.
Here are a couple of surprising takeaways from the article:
Ninety five percent of El Pasoans surveyed were strongly or somewhat in favor of the city’s plans to pipe treated sewage into their homes so they could brush their teeth with it. Well, actually, those nice folks at UTEP’s Institute for Policy and Economic Development, who conducted the survey, didn’t call it poop water. They called it “treated wastewater that’s good enough for irrigation . . . .” I bet if they’d called it poop water the results would have been different.
Also, we’re not doing this because we have to. Remember, El Paso has plenty of water to support all the sprawl and economic development our benevolent oligarchs have been telling us is good for us.
“While their driving force is desperation,” Balliew said of Wichita Falls and other cities, “our driving force is diversification.”
In my opinion, this a just the next step in a logical progression. Our city fathers are going to start literally doing to the citizens what they’ve been figuratively doing for a long time.
Another question is which users will get the treated sewage, and which will still receive aquifer water in their bathtubs?
El Paso Water Utilities and the Public Service Board are gingerly moving ahead with plans for an $82-million Advanced Water Treatment Plant that will turn treated water from the Mission Valley’s Bustamante Wastewater Treatment Plant into purified drinking water.
Since most of the water that’s currently treated is pumped into the river, the “purified” water will probably be piped to houses nearby. So the rich people who live up on the mountain will continue to drink water pumped up from the Hueco Bolson, and the people who live in El Paso’s poorer neighborhoods will get to drink their own toilet water.
Sounds like business as usual for El Paso.
I’m not quite sure what the shocker is here. When my daughter was in 3rd grade in about 1990, her class took a tour of an El Paso sewerage water treatment plant. I remember it was way the hell on the outskirts of town, maybe in the Northeast. We were lead by a good old boy plant official on walkways where we stared down into some truly filthy water, with shit, cigarette butts and spit gobs floating by. The goal of this sickening tour was to show us how clean the water was at the end of the treatment process. At that point, good old boy put some in glasses and invited us to drink it. I can’t remember who went first. I know I did the Betty Draper-at-the-farm-on -the-class-outing thing and was the mom who gamely volunteered. It tasted just fine and I did not get sick. It looked fine, too.
The other thing I will never forget about this experience: Good Old Boy had us all on the catwalks, where you had to walk strictly single file. That meant that some of the kids were at the front of the line and others were at the back; then when we got to the end, we reversed direction and the line changed, too. “It’s like the Bible!!!” Good old boy effused. “The first shall be last and the last shall be first!” He cited the chapter and verse. Whereupon third grader Maria Hart, bless her heart, daughter of Paula Thomas, who at the time was running for Democratic state something or other out of El Paso on an anti-abortion platform, yelled to Good old boy: “Hey! We’re here for a water treatment plant tour, which is science — not for religion! Separation of church and state! Separation!” Maria, I love you forever. I think you are now teaching somewhere in El Paso. Carry on, turning shit to clear, cleansing principal.
Obviously, like the residents of Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune, everyone who lives in the desert Southwest will eventually be drinking their own bodily fluids. But our benevolent oligarchs who are foisting sprawl on El Paso in the guise of economic development are ignoring the limitations of a critical natural resource.
At the Fred Hervey Water Treatment Plant (which was probably the one you went to) they’re at least injecting the treated waste water into the ground, where it can percolate and filter through the geological strata, and be diluted with the water in the aquifer. Also, that way, everyone gets to drink it. Not just the huddled masses down by the river.
I wonder where they get the water for the moat around the Island in the Willows.
Rich, you are absolutely right: I now remember how G.O.B. told us the clean water was being re-injected into the Bolson.